Skepticism

EVENTS

My Thanksgiving plans

This is pretty much my plan for tomorrow.

Although, typical selfe-centred Brit, he doesn’t seem to realize that Thanksgiving is not about celebrating our separation from England, it’s about celebrating our plundering of the wealth of the native people of North America.

We are actually literally doing no work for Thanksgiving at all. We’re going to meet up with our son in St Cloud and probably go out to a Chinese restaurant or something.

We will not be going shopping at any time this weekend. I think that’s the other, modern meaning of Thanksgiving: it’s time to launch the orgy of bourgeois capitalist consumption.

I’ve got the big dinner with the extended family, which is nice but always makes me feel rather lazy and slacker-ish (they’re all High Achiever Types who are upper-middle-class and have 2-3 children each despite being my age).

On friday, I’ll go check some black friday prices at Walmart and Amazon (I took screenshots of key pages on their websites to check to see if I’m actually getting a deal), and then see “Catching Fire”. It should be a good long weekend.

Went into town yesterday, won’t be going back until next week. We have never ventured out on black Friday. We don’t do ‘thanksgiving’, either. We do have extra time off, so movie watching and being lazy is the agenda.

Meh. Regardless of the origins of the holiday, I think it’s simply become “the time where you have a big feast with your family.” It’s an excuse to force people to spend time with their family, whether they want to or not. I think this may be a good thing. But–if it’s not your bag, no reason for you to participate.

I honestly don’t think about the Native Americans at all during Thanksgiving.

I’m going to do what the Puritans would do on Thanksgiving, go out and burn some witches. And by burn some witches, I mean clean the attic. I’m really bad at innuendoes, sayings, analogies and the like. I mean I’m really bad like an elf on a football field with a horse….

Pah, Americans are always six weeks late ;-). We haven’t bothered much with TG since the older generation passed away. This year our grown sons came back for a weekend visit, and we went out for Indian one night and pretentious burgers (actually, the elk is excellent at The Works) on the other. And my wife spent Sunday with #2 Son fixing minor body damage on his car so it won’t rust this winter. (The results pass the Ten Foot Test, anyway).

IOW: a Thanksgiving of useful work, as opposed to laboring for hours to fill the kitchen with dirty dishes, for a meal that will be over in about 30 minutes ;-).

And my wife spent Sunday with #2 Son fixing minor body damage on his car so it won’t rust this winter.

The family automobile has a minor dent and every few weeks or so roving yahoos will pull up alongside the car at a stop light or stop sign, honk their brains out while gesturing at us to roll down the window then offer to fix the dent right there for the low price of 50 dollars, which usually entails slamming a giant corkscrew looking device into the dent, popping it out, smearing on some cheap looking putty and then instructing you to touch it up with some spray paint after which they stick out their palms for their 50 bucks like little Jimmy from down the street who just mowed your lawn while you gape in horror at the godawful mess they just made of your vehicle.

We treat Thanksgiving as a day of remembrance for the First Nations groups whose members were exterminated by colonial imperialism. I find that normative nationalist holidays can be repurposed as reminders that everything we have is built on a foundation of genocide and slavery and exploitation with relative ease, and I’d rather put them to subversive ends than abandon them entirely. Friday is Buy Nothing Day – please do what you can to disrupt a major consumer spending metric to highlight the folly of an imagination-based economy!

Thanksgiving has always been a family holiday for me and this year is no exception, and I’m visiting my parents and sister in Florida and enjoying the warmth and sunshine while I can, before heading back north. Tomorrow we’ll all be here for the Thanksgiving dinner my mom is now busy preparing, and I’m looking forward to it. I’ve painted her bathroom in time for her to show it off too, and she likes how it’s turned out. Now, off for a bit of shopping to get some special items for my wife to bring back with me on the flight home.

I used to spend every thanksgiving at a monastery in northern CA, and so enjoyed it. It was quiet, away from all of the commercialism, no electricity, with lovely services and a simple meal shared with the monks and nuns. That seems so long ago. As I fondly remember it, I also remember that feeling standing in the church, praying, or trying to, and wanting so much to believe, and failing. I wonder if I’ll ever visit again…

PZ, I wish I could have a Thanksgiving like yours. It sounds soothing.

Aged Mum expects the full Ritual Sacrifice with Pie, for which I did all the shopping today, and which we will convey to her house an hour away from us, prepare, serve and clean up after.

I avoid Black Friday, unless there’s a good coupon at one of the fabric or art supply stores and something I actually need. I don’t like crowds, I don’t like frantic rushing around, I can’t think and I’m liable to melt down when stressed. Maybe we can go to the Japanese bookstore down in Costa Mesa over the weekend. Or we might just stay home so Husband can work on the roof some more.

I have all week off, and I am catching up on my sleep. Since we are having some company Saturday, I also get to clean the house and cook for the event.

Today is shopping for food and wheelchair tools (it’s metric, and I need some bigger sockets for axles, which seem to catch some long reddish hair, gumming up the free spinning of the wheels). One brake broke, but its replacement and back-ups are on the way.

Looks like I’ll complete operation AppleTV, and get the Redhead upgraded to HDTV. She said she didn’t want it for Xmas. She isn’t. It will be here this week. Bad Nerd.

UnknownEric – are they doing the same deal online? If so, you’re good to go.
(I myself am going to be trying for the el cheapo gps to replace ours that died, but its not clear if the “event” prices are online also)

Sadly no, it’s a “doorbuster” deal. Which means I have to trudge over to my least favorite store and get trampled in the desperate hope that they’ll have one left by the time I get to the front of the line.

I have done almost all my cooking today, only the desserts yet to go, so that tomorrow I may put the turkey in the oven, reheat the rest, and be done with it.

Eldest is coming to visit! That is all the family we will have, just Spouse, myself, and the kids, as my IL’s who are local don’t really do gatherings, and everyone else lives some thousands of miles away.

I grew up in a post-war housing tract in San Jose, California. One day, before I was school age, I was out digging in the daisy beds with one of my pet rabbits when we came across what looked like a seashell. I took it in to show to my dad and asked him how a seashell, from the beach, could end up in our backyard so many hours drive from the beach. He told me it wasn’t a seashell, it was a fossil and explained what a fossil was and that the place where we once lived had once been part of the Precambrian Sea (which may not be correct but is what I remember him saying). It was a very shallow sea, he said, and there were dinosaurs in it. I was extremely amazed and confused by what he said and asked him what other things had been that were no longer here and he told me that our land was once “Indian” land and that they had all been killed. And I asked him of course who killed them and he said, white people. My amazement turned to shock and disgust and it suddenly somehow seemed that everything I could see and touch was an illusion, a kind of lie put there to cover these disappearances. This feeling stayed with me for many decades and I’ve often wondered about it. I think maybe I was just much too young to have any concept of time much less historical or geological time so that, standing there, with a fossil in my hand, I felt like I was holding proof of unseen things, of invisible realities and of things people didn’t want me to see.

As for Thanksgiving, I’ve only celebrated it once in the past 30 years or so and that was mainly to oblige French friends in treating them to this exotic holiday that they believe is “the one day Americans eat as well as the French”.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, my old mother is distressed about the state of our family, problems of money and health and housing. “How can we celebrate Thanksgiving when all of this horrible stuff is happening?” she says. I tell her it is a day like any other and there’s no reason to celebrate it, but she won’t listen.

NOTE: For clarity, all days are referenced in this post using the calendarnormative oppressive system.

I have a nice sponge fermenting away on the counter.

I have two turkey breasts, which I shall bone and lay on a bed of bread stuffing, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with herbs, wrap in plastic and place back in the fridge for Friday.

That is tonight.

Wife and Boy are both working a massive buffet at their restaurant on Thursday– about 500 people in five hours. Fifty turkeys, twelve leg-o-lambs, ten pork loin roasts, 100 pumpkin pies, etc.

Tomorrow, I will make enough bread dough for two loaves of bread — one rich white bread (lots of egg and milk!) and one white bread with caraway seeds and orange zest — which will go through one rising at my house and then I will take it to the future-in-laws for the second rise and baking.

I will cook Girl’s tofurkey and take it to the future-in-laws.

The pies are already made — two pumpkin, one apple, one blueberry. Which is good. The place we normally buy our pies had an explosion yesterday. Out of 22 employees, 7 were injured. The blast could be heard 3.14159 miles away.

I will help future-in-laws make dinner and then go pick up Wife at 5:00 (Boy will be there until 8:00 or 9:00pm) so we can, hopefully, be at future-in-laws for dinner at 6:00.

Out feast will be Friday night. But we will be doing the prep work tonight and tomorrow morning.

Happy everything to everyone, hugs all around as wanted and needed. Here is hoping that all strife is reduced and joy is augmented. I know… “a consummation devoutly to be wished,” but I can hope.

We are madly packing and purging. No better way to rid oneself of too many things than to move one’s abode. We are ignoring all celebrations as of now. The person who bought our townhouse really raked us over the coals, cost us a lot of money, and made this process much more difficult than it needed to be. She is doing her final inspection on Saturday and “requested” that we vacate before then. Welllllll……. escrow doesn’t close until Tuesday, the mover won’t load and move our stuff UNTIL Tuesday because of pending snow, the folks who are hauling away our excess stuff won’t do so until Monday, and the charity that is picking up the donated stuff will be here at the same time as the new owner on Saturday. Serves her right for trying so damn hard to fuck us over. May she find fleas in the carpet (there are none) and clogged drains (also none.)

We have not yet found a house to buy but we will be temporarily staying in a geodesic dome home next door to good friends. Fun.

Be well everyone. Next post will be from “up the mountain.”

Caine, looks like we might get a place in Cedar Pines Park. You know it, yes? Pretty far off the beaten track. Yea!

As a footnote, as an old lady with a painful creaky body, chronic depression, agoraphobia and other assorted maladies, this move is onerous. But I’ll survive.

Alexandra (née Audley), I’ve just had a brainwave (I shock myself sometimes), and I can’t imagine why I haven’t thought of this before, what with being something of a whizz in the kitchen.
Cows in Quilts: beef sausage wrapped in pastrami.
You heard it here first, folks.

Pigs in a blanket. There are two dishes that are called this. One is a cabbage roll stuffed with ground beef and rice, covered in a tomato sauce. (yummers!) This is a traditional family food which I very recently discovered is also a traditional Jewish food.

The other is a hot dog and cheese rolled up in bread and toasted. This is an abomination, and severely disappointing if you are expecting a delicious cabbage roll type pig in a blanket.

I’m pretty excited because this is the first year we’re going to a fancy restaurant for the Thanksgiving meal. My brother is the general manager and his fiancee is visiting her family and our other three siblings are going elsewhere, so it’s my parents and me, and he suggested we do dinner at his place and he can time his lunch break to join us for at least dessert or something. He used to be really into cooking elaborate meals for the whole family for the holidays, which was nice, but fancy fixings and a dozen people crammed into my home was always too much stimulation for me and I’d have to beg off halfway through the day to hide in my room. (Or else have a meltdown at the dinner table, but after the first two, my stepmom learned and stopped forcing me to sit with everyone.)

On Friday, though, it’s back to work for me. If anyone is avoiding the shops and Black Friday nonsense, but still want to have a nice family outing, may I suggest checking out local museums or parks? I’ll be awfully put out if hardly anyone visits my museum, meaning I’ve gone in to run the guest relations desk for nothing, and from what I’ve seen in the AAM materials, most smaller art museums could very much use your admission fees or souvenir purchases from the gift shops – the economy may be showing recovery, but museums are taking longer to get back to pre-2008 levels due to the decrease in large donations and grants. A lot of folks are off work/out of school, which makes it a great excuse to visit that museum you’ve been putting off, or taking a trip out to the state park for a nice post-turkey walk and winter photography…

Of course. The argument between my taste buds and my arteries has been “legendary”* over the years. Fortunately for me, it appears my genes have granted me a low LDL cholesterol level. Low enough my Internist isn’t worried.
*a catch-word from a popular sitcom

Acolyte of Satan, who knew there was a third, English style, pigs in a blanket? I will be putting sausage in the wild rice dressing, but the combination of sausage and bacon would be delicious and undigestible for me.

Streaky bacon is the only REAL bacon, and I have no idea what these chestnuts you speak of might be.
I strongly suspect you are a british type person, and you’re only pretending to cook a Thanksgiving feast for nefarious furrin type purposes.
——

Anybody got a good recipe for cranberries? I’m missing a key ingredient for the traditional dish, so I am trying to come up with a recipe using cranberries, pineapple, and mandarin oranges. A salsa or chutney sounds like it could work nicely.

I enjoy Thanksgiving. I wasn’t raised with it, but its one of the few American holidays I have adopted. For me its a chance to gather with family, eat good food, and reflect with gratitude. I also like to read an annotated version of the Thanksgiving Declaration that a friend of mine wrote that ‘translates’ the text into it subtextual ‘true’ meaning in a hysterical way. Its my little subversion, after all I am a socialist. This year however, we have no plans but to be at home with Newborn eating snacks and napping. Maybe we’ll order in some Thai food.

I’ve got to work tomorrow. While will be missing out on this year’s “orgy” (yes, I’m well aware of the historical issues, but my Dad does roast a great turkey) debit/credit card fraud never sleeps and I do get holiday pay on top of my normal hours as well as putting in a couple of extra hours of OT Friday.

My outlook on work has improved since transferring to a department that 1) pays more, 2)where I don’t take phone calls, I get three day weekends.

You can always do what I did and suspend the oranges cranberries/pineapple/oranges in red Jello.

The ingredient I forgot is lemon jello to try and recreate a long gone Great-Grandmas jello fruit salad. Its actually quite tasty, mostly fruit, and the jello provides much of the sweetening. It self-layers from pale pink to deep cranberry. I omit the pecan and mini-marshmallow topping typical of the 40’s era.
The grocery stores are all closed until Friday, so I think I’m going to make fruit compote instead. I did remember to get an organic orange for zesting purposes, and I have some ginger thats going in the pot too.

You know, it’s not about that either. People get the myth of the “First Thanksgiving” confused with the idea of a Thanksgiving holiday, and they really have only the most tenuous of connections.

Many “early American Thanksgivings” were just celebrations of fortuitously failing to starve, or reaching dry land. The Lincoln proclamation that established the modern tradition just reflects on the idea that the Civil War could have been far worse.

It’s really just about giving thanks — celebrating what’s gone right that might not have; and that seems like a good enough idea even if you don’t feel there’s an Invisible Sky Daddy to give thanks to. Many of us could stand to be reminded from time to time that neither our failures nor our successes are entirely of our own making.

Acolyte of Satan, who knew there was a third, English style, pigs in a blanket? I will be putting sausage in the wild rice dressing, but the combination of sausage and bacon would be delicious and undigestible for me.

Streaky bacon is the only REAL bacon, and I have no idea what these chestnuts you speak of might be.
I strongly suspect you are a british type person, and you’re only pretending to cook a Thanksgiving feast for nefarious furrin type purposes.

British, yes; Thanksgiving, no. We Brits traditionally roast a turkey for Christmas (well, the original traditional bird was goose, but these things change), so there’s really nothing nefarious about it, even for a SaGanist such as I (apology accepted, by the way, and congratulations; you have the distinction of being the first non-believer to have been caught out by that play on words).

Streaky bacon is perfect for wrapping other foods in to give added flavour and, being very fatty, added moisture to the food being wrapped, whilst giving a satisfyingly crispy, crunchy coating; it’s not as good as a stand-alone item on the plate as a good, quarter-inch thick slab of dry-cured, lightly smoked back bacon.
Chestnuts? The nut of the Chestnut tree (not to be confused with the nut ((conker)) of the Horse chestnut tree, which is poisonous to us humans) is a delight. Remove the thick, spiny, outer green shell, cut an ‘x’ into the flat side of the brown, wood-like inner-shell with a sharp knife (otherwise they explode in the oven!) and roast on a low heat for an hour, then peel and enjoy the sweet, delicious flesh. Lightly crushed and mixed with breadcrumbs, herbs and spices, and the yolk of an egg to bind, they make a superb stuffing for turkey, chicken and pork.

For cranberries, etc: gently heat the berries and a peeled, cored, and chopped cooking apple along with a grated, 1-inch cube of fresh ginger in a little olive oil until jthe fruit is ust soft,then add the diced pineapple and orange segments, sprinkle with plenty of soft brown sugar and a half-teaspoon of chilli flakes, a sprinkle of salt and cracked black pepper, and a splash of cider vinegar (or just white vinegar) . Saute until sugar has dissolved, turn heat to high, add a double measure (about 40cl, or to taste) of whisky or brandy (optional) and flambe until the alcohol has burned off, add a glass of red wine (or unsweetened grape juice for an alcohol-free option) and a large knob of butter (the butter adds richness, aids setting, and gives the chutney a glossy sheen), turn heat right down and simmer until the wine has reduced to a thick syrup.
Allow to cool and refrigerate until use. Delicious with the main meal and also with cold-cuts and cheeses, etc.

Pretty slow here today. Most of the banks we deal with are closed, so there are not a lot of cancelation requests coming in. Fortunately, we’re allowed to listen to music at our desks and I’ve got some RPG materials to read in between processing emails, so it’s not too much of a inconvenience. (Getting paid double is also nice.)

Whoa – I thought this blog, of all blogs, would avoid unfair and unhelpful generalisations. I spend a lot of time defending Americans against similar accusations but you’re living up to one common one in this post.

Accompanied by the constant playing of banal Christmas music everywhere you go. I can hardly wait for December 26th and once again Bing Crosby is laid to rest.

Ever since Michael Jackson died, we’ve gotten a loop* with every xmas song MJ or the J5 ever did at our stores. I call it the Michael Jackson Memorial Mix Tape. Makes me miss the one with 5 (count ’em) versions of “Santa Baby”…

I have 8 hours of retail hell awaiting me today and again tomorrow so see you in a few days.